As a consumer my concern is the products I order are delivered when I expect them to be delivered. I am not sure how that crosses with Amazon worker unionization concerns. If Amazon can satisfy my consumer concerns with or without unions, I’m satisfied. They are obviously doing that now. Showing solidarity…what benefit does that give the consumer? It just means sacrifice for me.
If you're unionized, collective bargaining. Unions that are stronger are able to better support each other. The better deal amazon's workers get, the better deal you can get.
Sure, if you're a high-payed tech worker, your own wage is pretty disconnected from the warehouse worker market - but not completely. And I bet you have friends and family who's wages are MUCH closer linked.
The impact on tech worker wages is probably negative because unionization is associated with lower profits. Especially for tech workers who derive the majority of their income from equity.
Highly unionized countries do not tend to have a higher per-capita income across all socioeconomic demographics when compared to the US. It's not clear that unionization is an overall net positive for higher income individuals.
Indeed. Granting a one group small ownership stake swings some of their allegiances towards ownership and away from labour. I would ask myself what cost that small slice of ownership you’ve been granted (play on words intended) comes at to the people around you. To me it doesn’t seem very different from buying off union leaders. Are you that easily bought?
I.e. maybe supporting unions leads to a smaller gap between your tech salary, and a warehouse worker. That’s still going to benefit you, in that the people around you are less desperate, and have more energy to put into their communities, etc.
Your rhetoric is disgusting and regrettable, but worst of all it's simply inaccurate. I support the right to unionize regardless of whether it benefits me personally.
It seems the area where you and I differ is that my commitment to telling the truth regarding the various economic ramifications is more important than my political ideology.
I do have a political ideology, but so do you. My overarching point as been to insist that socio-economic class, consumer and worker separation, and stock granting are as political ideas as worker solidarity and class consciousness. But you’re calling that untruthful, and ideologically motivated, and disgusting rhetoric, so I guess we’re probably done
I'm calling out your projections. Your posts are riddled with inaccurate blind guesses about me. None of what you're saying is correct, as a simple matter of fact.
I encourage you to take a break and think about your perspective. If your points are worth making should be able to make them without these ad-hominem guessing games.
Nothing about me is relevant when it comes to objective facts such as the way unions impact economies.
>If your points are worth making should be able to make them without these ad-hominem guessing games.
>Your rhetoric is disgusting and regrettable
This you? Feels like a bit of 'projection'.
The poster you're replying to is making general commentary about class consciousness between the consumer/worker dichotomy. You view yourself as separate from this. Okay great. His points really aren't specific to you, even in statements like "That’s still going to benefit you, in that the people around you are less desperate"
Replace <you> with <higher income worker> if that helps engage with the content. I have a feeling, though, if you view his argument (a very basic 'a rising tide lifts all boats' one) as disgusting, you're probably not very interested in trying to understand his point of view in the first place.
No, the poster I'm replying to is obsessively making guesses about who I am as a person, rather than commenting on the subject at hand. They've made a series of guesses. They guessed that I work and appealed to my identity rather than form a meaningful argument. After discovering that I don't work, they made a series of other inaccurate guesses about my economic background.
This is objectively regrettable. It's fallacious argumentation and in fact is against the rules of this forum.
My response is addressing these disgusting tactics. In contrast, I've said nothing about who this person is as an individual -- because it's irrelevant.
>No, the poster I'm replying to is obsessively making guesses about who I am as a person
The poster you're replying to has provided a synopsis of his argument; it has nothing to do with you. Part of the site's rules are that you should be charitable regarding how people phrase their arguments - just try to understand what he's trying to get at - it's very clear his argument isn't about you as a person. Focusing on this while ignoring the substance of his statements is obviously not going to generate a productive discussion.
Trying to use phrasing which allows people to relate to the discussion isn't 'objectively regrettable'.
Spinning this into a meta discussion about how the discussion should be framed is a waste of time, so I'll end my contribution here. I hope my notes help untangle the mess.
Your summary is simply not what took place above. I suggest you re-read the comment thread. Here are some specific links to help you improve your notes:
>Your summary is simply not what took place above.
You seem dead set on doing anything other than actually engaging with the substance of the post. I didn't say the term 'you' wasn't used. I said the argument has nothing to do with you, or perhaps more accurately, it doesn't rely on any lived experience you've had - you're irrelevant to the point being made.
Let's look at a sample argument: My eyes generally see things well, I see that the sky is blue, therefore, since I trust my eyes, the sky is blue.
In this argument, we have 1) A premise, 2) Evidence, 3) Rationale, and 4) A conclusion.
Let's modify the argument a bit. My eyes generally see things well, I see that the sky is blue - and so does everyone including you, therefore, since I trust my eyes, the sky is blue.
The element we've added here, that everyone sees that the sky is blue, is not evidence in support of my conclusion, because my rationale depends on my trust in my eyes, not my trust in everyone else's. Disagreeing by stating "Blind people don't see that the sky is blue, so your evidence is faulty and your conclusion doesn't stand - the sky isn't blue because of blind people" is a poor critique; there ARE weaknesses in the argument, to be sure, but that isn't one of them.
To return to this thread, you're attacking elements of the post which aren't the core of the argument; they're attempts to make the argument cogent to you (which obviously failed), but aren't elements upon which the argument relies upon.
Anyways, you're clearly not arguing in good faith - there's no attempt to interface with ANY of the content being posted. I'm done here.
Abclaw is entirely correct, btw. I don’t know you, it would be weird for me to make those kinds of guesses about your life and work experience. That shoulda been your first clue that I might have been using an indefinite “you” there. Have a good one!
That’s still arguing worker benefits. I am asking as a consumer, what is in it for me to cancel services I use and are happy with to be in solidarity? I don’t see any benefit, only sacrifice. So the only reason I see for acting in solidarity is if you are specifically politically inclined toward them.
Again you’re separating your worker identity and your consumer identity. You can’t consume if you don’t work. They are intrinsically linked, but you’re choosing to see them as separated. Yes, Maybe you give up your prime for a few months, but next year when you’re negotiating your salary, you have a stronger collective bargain position (unionized or non)
Your argument relies on an assumption. You make the assumption that my employer exploits me. They don’t. Perhaps Amazon exploits some of their workers (local drivers, warehouse workers, but tech…hardly). I’d argue that in 2022 with US labor laws…most workers aren’t exploited. Some think they are—some perhaps politically think this soft Marxism you are alluding to is a good thing.
So what we have again is a situation where a consumer like me is not in the position of a unionizing Amazon worker so we can’t identify with their labor situation. I don’t have a dogmatic political stance on them unionizing. In their current non-unionized work situation, I’m content to be a customer. In a unionized situation, I’m content to be a customer as long as the product they provide meets my needs. I don’t have a dog in their fight, so there is zero need to me to stop using a product I want to be in solidarity with them.
I don’t want to make assumptions about your specific work, so let’s talk about tech workers in general. As an example, Facebook made over $9 billion in profit in 2021. If you work for facebook, you were exploited to the tune of around 9bil/63k employees, so an average of 142k and change. If you distributed that according to current salaries, most tech workers at fb would probably be due a few 100k more per year.
Without the labour of their workers, facebook does not exist. From the people who serve lunch to the accountants to the coders. Yet that 9bil did not go to them, it went to the shareholders. That’s exploitation, pure and simple. You can support it, if you think it’s a good system, but it is exploitation.
Tech companies know that their workers are underpaid for their value - they wouldn’t have had to collude to fix wages if it wasn’t the case. Just because you think you’re very well paid, doesn’t mean you’re not being exploited.
All that is setting aside the very obvious reason you should have solidarity with amazon warehouse workers: they are human beings and they provide a service you enjoy, you should not want them to suffer.
> most tech workers at fb would probably be due a few 100k more per year.
so what happened to the providers of the capital that facebook was built with? How come they don't get anything from those profits?
I think your ideology is clouding your judgement on what counts as "fair", and this is making you think that workers who don't get 100% of the profit of the work they produce, must be underpaid or somehow is being exploited. The idea that capital provided upfront (to pay those workers, as well as plant and equipment) isn't in your line of argument at all.
> Without the labour of their workers, facebook does not exist.
without the upfront capital paid by the shareholders, facebook would not exist as well. It's both, together, that makes it work. The deal the workers accepted was to be paid upfront, at a fixed amount, for a fixed amount of work (counted by time, usually). Then, the shareholders gets the profit from the difference in sale price of the work. They take on the risk that the work is worthless in a changing world, a risk that the workers do not take (unless the worker chooses to accept payments in shares). I don't see this as exploitation.
> without the upfront capital paid by the shareholders, facebook would not exist
It’s pretty debatable how much of the money they raised was critical. They needed a bit of seed money, no question - and without regular injections of cash they would have had a much slower growth curve, for sure. They might not have been able to buy out instagram and whatsapp - but that didn’t create much value - those things existed without facebook. We might even need to account for the value that facebook’s rise took away from other firms, if we’re trying to calculate how much net value facebook’s investors have created - rather than just how much value has been enveloped into the firm - but let’s stay on point.
Overall, giving money to someone starting a business, well that sounds like you’re describing a loan. A loan entitles you to get paid back, with interest. The interest is there to cover the risk that you might not get paid back.
What we have instead is “ownership”, which seems to entitle you to the profits of a company’s workers in perpetuity.
Numbers are a little thin, but it seems like facebook took on something like $1bil in various investments before their ipo, and raised about 16bil with their ipo (tho unclear if that 16bil went to the company, or investors + the company).
Facebook has posted profits in the billions for years now. If you only count earnings since their ipo, about $173bil cumulative going to investors.
At what point is the loan paid back? How much interest are they entitled to? At 9 years post investment they’ve paid back 10x what was given to them - that’s well over a 100% interest rate - and that is set to never end.
> Overall, giving money to someone starting a business, well that sounds like you’re describing a loan.
There are many ways to obtain capital - loans being one. A loan is guaranteed, often having a need for collateral. I highly doubt anyone would loan Facebook money without collateral at the early stage.
Equity ownership is not a loan, and it is indeed a perpetual entitlement to all profits. It's pretty much the only form of "loan" for a new business.
You still have not made any arguments as to why ownership is wrong, other than merely asserting it.
If tomorrow all of amazon’s stock disappeared from the ledgers, would anything change about the company? The warehouses would still be there, drivers would still do their rounds. It’d be a chaotic next board meeting, but that’s about it. Ownership contributes nothing to the equation, and demands a massive cut of what the real productive work produces. That’s why ownership is parasitic. As a general rule, why would we allow parasites? But even if you don’t want to see ownership that way, it still has undeniably and repeatedly lead to extreme concentration of wealth - which means poverty and starvation for the masses and superyachts for the few.
So you must feel then that tech workers at a company that doesn’t show a profit for many years or operates in the red during their start up phase should payback a portion of the the salary they collected during the time they were not profitable when they become profitable? Those tech workers would have never have received a wage were it not for the investors taking a risk and providing the patience to the reward. The tech worker who drew a salary during that time took zero risk and totally exploited the investor.
Ideally, the workers would be the investors. If we were being paid for the full profits of our labour we wouldn’t have these ultra rich investors - since they all got rich off profits created by workers in the first place - and we as workers would have plenty of money to put into new ventures. Instead of raising $x mil from softbank, you hire people who bring seed money from their previous job with them, and are willing to work for no pay for a few years on the promise of building something useful that gets them paid back and paid well going forward.
The idea that startup workers aren’t already taking on risk is weird. There’s clearly direct risk, and opportunity cost style risk already baked into jobs at new companies. A fee bad turns and late paychecks and you could end up homeless.
Investors risk… Not homelessness. Not poverty. They risk losing money they never earned in the first place.
One of the key evolutionary characteristics of firms is that they must self-appropriate more value in their network of transactions than they dispense. Their engagement with labour is no different; if they paid labour more than the value they received for work, they would go out of business. Maybe you're an exception where the firm is losing value or going dead-equal on the deal, but given that firms who habitually do that go out of business, you'd be in a tiny minority.
Accordingly the question isn't if you're exploited. It's how much. A firm is going to need to get SOME margin off you - that's fine. But how much is too much? What factors systemically result in them taking too much margin, etc. Having the discussion in those terms allows you to actually interface with the reality of worker/corporate transactions.
Your analysis assumes a zero-sum situation but this simply isn't the case.
The intersection of labor and capital is enormously mutually beneficial.
Regarding fair allocations of proceeds, one could just as easily argue that labor is exploiting capital, and that capital should take a greater share of profits. In fact, both outcomes are certainly, demonstrably true in different scenarios. In a chapter 11 bankruptcy, capital is lost while wages remain protected.
Your argument is in regard to the average outcome, and as such it glosses over the inherent give and take, risk and reward, present in a variable and chaotic -- but undeniably mutually beneficial -- system.
You are mistaken, the analysis derives out of one of the core elements of firm theory. It doesn't assume a zero-sum situation at all.
There's a lot of literature on 'the analysis', which happens to not be mine. It's actually one of the core elements of neoclassical economics.
>one could just as easily argue that labor is exploiting capital
No, one couldn't.
>In a chapter 11 bankruptcy, capital is lost while wages remain protected.
Depending on the jurisdiction, wages are provided a super-priority status. Other super-priority stakeholders are afforded equal protection amongst themselves. Priority stakeholders, such as lenders with security, are provided more protection than unsecured lenders, etc. Protection for missing wages exists solely due to rectifying legislation attempting to address of how disadvantaged a worker is when a business's assets are encumbered and they have no priority.
However, when it comes to managing risk, workers have to hope they'll get paid, while a secured lender can request assurances that potential super-priority stakeholders have been paid to determine the amount of exposure they're willing to entertain, and call their loans due in the event covenants and other monitoring systems indicate financial duress. Workers have no equivalent protective system.
Honestly most of these points feel like they're relatively uninformed and don't hold up to much scrutiny.
>> In a chapter 11 bankruptcy, capital is lost while wages remain protected.
> Depending on the jurisdiction,
Cutting through the unnecessary explanation, it appears you agree with me. In general, sometimes capital operates a wage paying business without providing a return to investors.
This point is observably true (otherwise a market wouldn't have losers) and I don't think you need to respond to it further.
I don't agree with you at all, for the reasons I've set out.
If you stopped reading after hearing that super priorities exist, and believed that their existence was proof that labour regularly defrauds capital, you'd have very much not understood anything.
Honestly, almost all of your posts here feel like they're exercises in ignoring content. I'm done.
So I am assuming that every product you buy, every merchant you frequent, every service you utilize…are only providers with active unions?
Willing to bet they aren’t…or you don’t know if they are or not, had no idea if they were unionizing or not, and didn’t think to even care before my comment.
I think it was less about unions and more about your sentiment of only caring about getting a service and not at all about the welfare of the people who bring you that service.
As for your hypocrisy accusation - we both know that’s not a valid argument. If you’re anything less than perfect you can't criticize? Nope.
Reality isn’t always virtuous. The smart phone in your hand or the computer you typed your comment on was likely developed by people who were likely unhappy with their working conditions and wage (assuming they even received one). You still bought it. You justified or overlooked the ugly to get the product you wanted or needed. Your shocked because I said it out loud?
The idea that the phone I own invalidates any efforts to improve things is a parody of an argument. If I had the ability to buy a phone that wasn’t made in terrible conditions, I would. If I had the luxury of being able to live without a phone, I would. I don’t, so the idea that now any criticism I have of workers conditions anywhere are invalid is laughable and ignores the numerous and very real ways I vote with my dollars for better working conditions
